activities such as running stores or working in service professions, they frequently resided in urban centers catering to shoppers of all races or in the neighborhoods where their customers lived. Driven by the backlash among whites over perceived economic competition, the provinces attempted to restrict Indians to specific locations starting the 1880s or, in the case of the Orange Free State, banned Indian residents altogether. Nevertheless, Indians became the group most likely to live near or among other racial groups. The 1950 Group Areas Act, the apartheid legislation that established segregated residential and business zones in cities, resulted in the displacement of Indians at a higher rate than any other section of the population.57
GANDHI IN SOUTH AFRICA
No figure looms larger in the history of Indians in South Africa than Mohandas Gandhi. As a substantial literature attests,58 Gandhi’s South African years were the most important period of his adult intellectual formation. The man who arrived as a prim, suit-wearing lawyer—a quirky Anglophile who believed in the promises of liberal empire—would eventually leave after he had renounced the materialistic philosophy of Western civilization and devised a series of new ideas that he would employ to historic effect in India. Born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, Gujarat, Gandhi qualified as a lawyer in England where he became interested in vegetarianism and theosophy. In 1893 he traveled to the Transvaal in order to translate in a legal dispute between two Gujarati businessmen. Gandhi then remained in South Africa for the better part of the next twenty-one years. In 1894 he plunged into local politics by organizing opposition to a bill introduced by the Natal legislature that would have disenfranchised Indians on the basis of race. Initially, Gandhi’s political agitation centered on the defense of Indian rights as British imperial subjects. He adopted the legalistic methods of elite nationalist politics. However, his experience living in South Africa (he was a firsthand witness to the industrial revolution emanating from Johannesburg) slowly propelled him toward different forms of spiritual and communal experimentation. In 1903, he established the journal Indian Opinion, which—as Isabel Hofmeyr argues—served as a space for nurturing different modes of community and subjectivity through “slow” practices of reading. Slowness, for Gandhi, functioned as an ethical counter to the acceleration of modern capitalist society.59 In 1904, he established the first of a series of famous retreats or ashrams, the Phoenix Settlement outside of Durban, where he practiced collective forms of work, prayer, and service with family and followers. After the tabling of the Asiatic Registration Act in 1906, Gandhi again assumed leadership of the opposition, but this time he departed from his earlier legalistic methods by refusing to comply with the measure. The resulting struggle, which ebbed and flowed until Gandhi’s departure in 1914, witnessed definitive moments in his biography and South African history: Gandhi’s first imprisonment, the public burning of the hated registration cards, the entrance of women into the struggle in opposition to the Supreme Court’s invalidation of Indian marriages, the famous march from New Castle to the Transvaal in defiance of provincial travel bans, and the 1913 strikes of Natal’s coal and cane workers.60
The great philosophical breakthrough of Gandhi’s South African years was the development of satyagraha. Adapted from a suggestion sent in by a reader of Indian Opinion, this term was used by Gandhi to differentiate the strategy of his campaign from the more circumscribed (and English-language) concept of passive resistance.61 Satyagraha combines the Sanskrit words for “truth” and “endurance.” Gandhi also glossed the concept as “truth force.” (Martin Luther King Jr. would later speak of “soul force.”62) In contrast to passive resistance, satyagraha is less a specific political tactic than a set of guiding principles that define the success of struggle: persistence in the face of suffering, absolute nonviolence, and the transformation—rather than the coercion—of the oppressor. Requiring inner discipline and intense spiritual preparation, satyagraha could assume varying forms in practice, including refusal to submit to unjust laws, fasting, economic boycotts, mass political mobilization, and creating alternative communities and institutions. The unifying thread of these different actions was the active subordination of self to the pursuit of justice and divine truth. Sidestepping the assumed community of deliberative reason, satyagraha insists on the recognition of common humanity by placing the suffering and vulnerable life of the satyagrahi in the hands of his or her opponent. Whether the object of protest accepts this responsibility or (generally) not, the opponent becomes a custodian of the other’s wellbeing. Consequently, there exists an enormous potential for violence in satyagraha, but it is a violence shouldered by the satyagrahi in the service of a higher purpose. Most radically, satyagraha entails a conception of struggle as the deepening of the ethical relationship between the two contending parties.63 These ideas—especially Gandhi’s emphasis on sacrifice, his critique of materialism, and the idea of struggle as spiritual conversion—would later interact and combine with the Christian traditions that nourished the intellectual life of the ANC.
Gandhi’s South African career remains engulfed in controversy. These debates center on two related questions. First, during his time in South Africa, Gandhi remained loyal to Britain and repeatedly defined his political goals in terms of the achievement of equal rights for South African Indians. To prove Indian fidelity, he mobilized a volunteer ambulance core to care for British soldiers during the 1899–1902 war between the Crown and the Afrikaner republics. When a section of the Zulu people rebelled against a colonial poll tax in 1906 under the leadership of Chief Bambatha kaMancinza, Gandhi once again offered his services by mobilizing an ambulance contingent. (In this case, he found himself caring for Africans who had been left to die after British troops butchered villages. He described these events as “No war but a man hunt.”64) Given his later status as the most globally recognized icon of anticolonialism, his early career invites accusations of hypocrisy. Desai and Vahed subtitle their searching exploration of these years “Stretcher-Bearer of Empire.”65
Second, not only do Gandhi’s South African writings describe Africans in racialized and pejorative terms (especially by utilizing the epithet kaffir), they also stress the danger of Indians sinking to the levels of “Natives.” Describing his first stint in prison, Gandhi writes: “We were then marched off to prison intended for Kaffirs. . . . We could understand not being classed with the whites, but to be placed at the same level of the Natives seemed too much to be put up with. It is indubitably right that the Indians should have separate cells. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.”66 Statements like this were not simply expressions of common prejudice. Because Gandhi rejected an alliance with Africans, his struggle to obtain rights for Indians as British subjects endorsed the colonial racial order: the “uncivilized” Native served as a common boundary that aligned Indianness with empire.67 It is also true that Gandhi moderated and, after he returned to India and embraced a more radical anticolonial position, eventually discarded these views. At moments in his South African writings, he praised individual Africans, most notably his neighbor John Dube, and imagined a far distant future when a new nation would arise from blacks, Indians, and whites.68 By the end of his life, he lent his considerable authority to a younger faction in South African Indian politics that sought a strategic rapprochement with the ANC. Nor were such racial views unique to Gandhi or his Indian peers. As Franco Barchiesi demonstrates, the early leaders of the ANC expressed similar sentiments about the “ruck of the native,” reflecting their embrace of liberal empire and a politics of inclusion within settler civil society.69 Be that as it may, Gandhi’s outlook helped to cement a conservative tradition in diasporic politics and a rhetoric of Indian civilizational superiority that long survived his departure.
Following Gandhi’s return to India in 1914, the Natal Indian Congress persisted as a small organization, composed mostly of passengers and their descendants, and dedicated to advocacy regarding issues that affected the Indian middle class. When a younger generation won control of the Indian Congress in the early 1940s, these activists seized on Gandhi’s time in South Africa—which since had been invested with the prestige of the Indian independence struggle—as a legacy to be appropriated and reinvented.70 Known as the “Radicals,” this group consisted of South African–born professionals and working-class
